Overview of two Analytics accounts

The following diagram shows two possible Analytics account configurations. Here, Liz has both a personal Analytics account and a company account shared with co-workers. Her company account tracks the company website, googleanalytics.com.

The rest of this document describes in detail the components that make up Google Analytics account management.

You need a Google account to use Analytics

Most Google products use Google Accounts to authenticate their users, such as Google Calendar, Blogger, and Gmail. A Google Account is a unified sign-in system that simplifies your experience with using multiple Google products—once you have signed in with your Google Account, you have automatic access to any other product that you have registered for. The Google Accounts sign-in includes:

An email address
This is typically of the form username@gmail.com. For example, Liz signs into Analytics using liz@gmail.com as her email address.

A password
Once Liz signs into her Gmail using her email address and password, she is automatically signed into the Analytics web interface and does not have to sign in a second time to view her reports.

To use Google Analytics, you must be signed in with a registered Google Account email address and password. If you don't have a Google account, create your Google Account now. Having a Google account does not automatically grant you access to Analytics—you must also register for Google Analytics, a one-time, simple process.

You can only access Analytics reports using a valid Google Accounts email address. You cannot sign in to Analytics with an email address hosted by Google Apps.

Analytics accounts

An Analytics account is way to name and organize how you track one or more properties (e.g. websites, mobile apps, point-of-sale devices) using Google Analytics. Each Google Analytics user has access to at least one account, either one they created themselves, or one that they were given access to by someone else. In each Analytics account, at least one property (such as a website) is being tracked. As shown above, a Google Analytics account can be used to track a single property, or it can track many distinct ones, depending upon the requirements of its use.

A given web property should only be tracked in one Google Analytics account. Tracking a single web property in different Analytics accounts is not currently recommended.

You do not need to sign in separately for each Analytics account that you have access to. In the above example, Liz signs in to Google Analytics with her Google Accounts email ID (liz@gmail.com); she can then select any of the Analytics accounts that she has access to.

Analytics accounts organization

If you are using Analytics to track a single website, account organization is simple: you will have one account for your website. For setting up Analytics accounts to manage multiple websites, keep in mind the following:

Each Analytics account can have up to 50 properties and each property can have up to 25 views. Contact your support representative if you need more properties or views.

You cannot migrate historical data from one account to another. Thus, if you set up an account for a property and then later want to move tracking to a separate account, you cannot currently migrate the data from the old account to the new account.

With that in mind, consider the following common ways that an Analytics account might be used:

Track all properties owned by a single person or organization.

For example, you might have an Analytics account named My Personal Account for your personal web properties. In this account, you would track your personal website and your blog, which are separate properties. In this case, you use one tracking code snippet on your website pages, and use a different one for your blog.

You might also set up different Analytics accounts for different groups or stakeholders. For example, if you administer Analytics tracking for two companies, you would set up a separate Analytics account for the websites owned by each company. Since you might want to provide administrative access to individuals in each company, you would not want to expose sensitive reporting data between companies, so it makes sense to track the websites from different companies in separate accounts.

Track a single property.

By default, an Analytics account is designed to track at least one property. However, this is also a good way to set up Analytics if the site/app you are tracking is large and has a number of contributors interested in viewing reports across that property. In this way, the collection of views within an account all correspond to the same property.

For instance, suppose you are the administrator for example.com, which has a number of sub-directories. If each department wants to track their section of the site/app independently from others, you can create distinct reporting views within the account that include only data from certain sections. In this scenario, you install the tracking code for the site/app once, and any difference in reporting views are handled by the views and their filters.

Analytics account ID

When you create an account in Google Analytics, the account is provided with a unique ID. This ID is part of the tracking code that inserted in the source code for your site or app. For example, if the tracking code for your site uses the property ID UA-10876-1, the account ID is the central number 10876.

Analytics properties

A property is a website, mobile application, or device (e.g. a kiosk or point-of-sale device.) An account can contain one or more properties.

In the Analytics tracking code, the property for a reporting view has a unique ID, which is a combination of the account ID and additional digits. This property ID links a property to one or more views in an Analytics account. The ID can be found in the Admin section of Analytics, or by searching for UA- in the source code of your web page or app. For a property ID UA-10876-1:

10876 is the account number.

1 is a view within the account. A second view for the same account that tracks an additional property might use UA-10876-2 for the property ID.

Analytics views

The view for an Analytics Account is the gateway to the reports: it determines which data from your property appears in the reports. When considering views and how they work, first remember that an Analytics account can track a single property, or track many independent properties, as illustrated in the overview above.

You can create more than one view for a given property, and use filters to provide distinct report views for the property. For more information on how to configure views, see Create/manage view filters.

Use a master view

When setting up tracking in an Analytics account, it is a best practice to make the first view for a property a master view. A master view should have no filter to exclude or include sections of the data from the site/app being tracked. In this way, you will have a view for the property that contains all historical data since tracking began.

If you do not set up a master view, but instead have views with filters excluding particular parts of your website, you will not have any data for the parts that have been excluded by the filter. For example, suppose you are mainly interested in tracking users to your site from the United States. If you set up a filter on a single view that includes only traffic from the U.S., you will never be able to see pageview data for traffic from anywhere but the U.S.

If you want filtered views, we recommend setting up two view types: one to track all sections of the site/app, and all users, and other ones more suited to a particular objective that excludes certain data. The master view should also be the first view you establish for your site.

Views and historical data

When you set up a view for a website, data tracking begins as soon as the tracking code is installed on the website and a user's browser loads a page. When you already have a functioning view for an existing website, and you add an additional view later on in time, the additional view will not contain the historical data that you see in the view created earlier.

For example, suppose in June of 2009 you set up an unfiltered view for your website collecting all traffic for the site. Then in September of 2009, you create an additional view called Sales that only collects data for the /sales directory of the website. If the users of the Sales view attempt to retrieve report information for July of 2009, they will see no data for that time frame. The data does exist in the initial view, but it cannot be copied over to the Sales view.

Filtered views

It is frequently useful to have multiple views for a single property. Each view can have filters to include or exclude particular types of data. You can also use filtered views to ensure that content is tracked only on a specific domain, to exclude certain traffic from the reports (such as internal traffic), or to replace difficult-to-read page query parameters with more easily visualized page URIs. For information on the types of filters available for views and how to set them up, read About view filters.

Unless you need to restrict user access via the reporting views, you might find it unnecessary to set up views purely for the purpose of viewing distinct sections of the site, or for making report viewing more convenient for your account users. In many cases, your users can access the master view and use the Content Drilldown menu to navigate to their section of the website/app. Once there, they can also use Segments to filter only the data they are interested in, and even use that as a means to compare metrics on their set of pages/screens to the entire website/app.

Sharing Analytics reports

You share your Analytics reports with other people who have Google Accounts. Those users who want to view your reports must first enable their Google Account for Analytics access (see google.com/analytics for info).

When you share your reports with other users, you can control which reports they have access to by giving them rights to a specific account that holds the report you want to share. Once users have access to your account, you can also control which view they have access to. So for example, if you want to let your colleagues view the Analytics reports for your gadget, but not for your blog or your website, you can give them access to your account, and then access only to the view that you have set to track your gadget.

When your colleagues have access to the reports, the account name appears as a separate selection in the Accounts drop-down menu of the administrative interface. After they select the account from the menu, they will see only those views that you have granted them access to. In this way, you can control access to your Analytics reports at multiple levels. Additionally, it is common for Analytics users to have access to a variety of Analytics accounts, both their own and others.

Two example Analytics accounts

The personal blog is one of the web properties that Liz tracks on Google Analytics. She needs only one view for this property, My Blog. The tracking code for her blog contains the web property ID, and that ID makes the association between her blog, and any view that tracks it. In order to view reports for the blog, Liz selects the My Blog view.

The reports for My Blog show only user traffic for example.blogspot.com. No activity on any other part of blogspot.com is contained in the Analytics reports, so users coming from www.blogspot.com to example.blogspot.com are reported as externally referred traffic, and users going from example.blogspot.com to some other blog on blogspot.com are reported as exiting the site.

My Website

www.example.com

UA-18988-1

Liz has a second website with a domain that is distinct from her blog. She wants to keep separate tracking reports for each property, so the website has a unique web property ID. The tracking code for her site references this ID, and this ID makes the association between the website and the view My Website.

This view is unfiltered, so the reports show all user traffic for www.example.com. Any users that go from her site to her blog are tracked in the reports as exiting the site, since these properties do not share web property IDs and are not linked.

My Gadget

84632.gmodules.com

UA-18988-3

In addition to a blog and a website, Liz also has a gadget that she likes to track. The gadget is hosted on the gmodules.com domain under a unique sub-domain. This gadget uses yet a third distinct web property ID. As with the other views, only activity on the gadget is reported for the My Gadgets view.

My Team's Account

Master View

googleanalytics.com

UA-10876-1

Liz has access to the Analytics account titled My Team Account, along with other team members. As with any website, the property ID is part of the tracking code installed on the website pages.

This view is the master view and collects all user traffic for all parts of the googleanalytics.com website. Because it is the master view, it has no filters that exclude data. In this way, all data is collected for the site and as the first view, contains the historic record of traffic from the inception of tracking.

Because view access can be restricted by individual account users, only Sue has access to the reports contained in the Master View. The members of the Sales and Marketing team cannot view the reports in this view since they have not been granted access.

Sales

googleanalytics.com/sales

UA-10876-1

In this account, the Sales views tracks the same property as the master view —the googleanalytics.com website. For this reason, it uses the same property ID as the master view. It differs from the master view because it uses a special filter to include only traffic on the sales section of the website: googleanalytics.com/sales.

User activity on other sections of the site is considered "outside" the site from the definition of the view. For example, total pageviews would be only for this section of the site, and not for the entire googleanalytics.com. Time on page and time on site would apply only to the pages being tracked.

Access to this view is available only to Sue and the members of the Sales team, including Liz and Jim.

Marketing

googleanalytics.com/marketing

UA-10876-1

Like the Sales view, the Marketing view tracks the the googleanalytics.com website, but its filter includes only traffic to googleanalytics.com/marketing. In this example, only Sue and Jim have access to the reports in the Marketing view.